TimeTwinks
by dblauvelt
Summary: A Companion struggles to set the Universe on the proper course (humor gay)... Completed.
1. Default Chapter

He's done it. He's finally gone and done it.

The bastard has left me stranded in the middle of nowhere, with no food, no money, no friends, nowhere to live and I don't even speak the frelling language.

He's gone and left me.

Thank god.

* * *

The sky is purple.

It's kinda cool, in a funky way. The clouds are just water vapor, as always, so they are generally on the mashed potato side of things as far as shape and color are concerned, but at sunset they go the sort of hue my Honda did when it started rusting, the red paint started peeling and flaking. Only in a pretty way, mind. Like if you could reach up and touch the sky it would feel gritty and crumble in your grasp with little bits lodging in your eyes.

I've been staring at the sky a lot lately. Not much else to do here.

I found the farm on my fourth day of wandering after Smeghead ditched me. I was down to eating bark, but not quite at the level of bug munching. You'd think after the number of times this kind of thing has happened I'd have a better strategy then eating everything around, vomiting most of it up and stick to the plants that don't make me boot. But everywhere I wind up the flora is always different.

I should have tried to stay in the Boy Scouts.

The farm is… well, farm-ish. It's got a barn, silo, some fields, rutting pigs, chickens everywhere and a big house with a porch where lots 'o sitting takes place. Nothing much happens here; just a couple of nice folks who let me crash in their loft. They have lots of Amber kids running around. I'm not sure if there are so many cause the dad needed the help on the farm or because whatever their religion is says 'Shag a lot, bring me cash.'

Don't care really. They're nice to look at. The sixteen year old kid definitely ranks in 'Cuteboy' category: model hot Amber with blue eyes. He won't look at me twice. It's almost like being home…

Except the sky is purple.

It's totally put me off oranges.

Can't explain that last bit.

* * *

Who'da thought knowing how to milk a cow would ever have done me any good? Thank ya, Aunty Pete. You may have broken three of my ribs with your fave shovel that last summer, but that beaten dun and taught me stuff. Squeezin' teats, yep, that'd be learnin'.

God, I'm bored.

Yes, sir, I'm now a bone fide farm hand.

Whee. That's right, the ex-aerospace engineer, ex-analyst for the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce and graduate of Stanford University possesses yet another mind-bending skill: Shoveling shit.

Only, I sorta suck at it. I forgot how painful this kinda stuff is, how my hands turn all yellowish as the skin is forced away from places it was really fond of, then puddles up with water and bursts free exposing the soft tender skin underneath to the wonders of the shovel handle.

Thomas (aka Cuteboy) shovels alongside me. Sweat does some pretty cool things to cotton tank tops. Must thank the inventor of the Spinning Jenny.

I will admit, hard labor doing great things for my upper body. My legs are still thin as rails though.

Oh God. I'm turning into a time-traveling twink.

I'll be singing Cher next.

* * *

'Ma' is going to bake blueberry pie tonight.

We've been eating some form of rolled spinach product for meals the past five days. I'm starting to think that things on the farm aren't quite what they appear. There's plenty of grain and animals but no one is eating them. Except for the eggs. The basement is littered with animal corpses hanging from the rafters but no one seems to be warming up the grill…

I've tried sneaking some pieces of jerky but those kids are everywhere, always popping up and shaking their head in disapproval. Not for me, their adorable little amber heads say. So I replace the bits of beef and trod my way back to the table and force down another lump of Spinach Surprise.

Needless to say everyone is very excited about the blueberry pie tonight. The girls all went berry collecting this fine autumn day and came back with their darling little faces all splotchy with gooey blue stains. So the plan is to eat spinach and chow down the pie as 'Father' reads from the book.

I still don't understand a word of their language but I hardly need to since I've seen it all before. I used to go over to Eric's house all the time and watch 'The Little House on the Prairie.'

Eric's family had cable.

Needless to say, I'm allergic to blueberries.

* * *

Oh happy day, the mail is here.

A dusty cart pulled past the farmhouse today and dropped a bundle of letters as it dawdled by.

The way the kids reacted you'd think it was the second coming, if the second coming involved Christmas, Halloween and Easter all rolled into one exciting afternoon. They screamed and yelled and danced and did cartwheels and stuff. It was mildly impressive. Better than dung shoveling anyway. I was almost expecting them to break into a choreographed 'Wells Fargo Wagon' number thingy.

Most of it was junk mail.

One was a letter from, I think, one of their relations. The upshot is we all get to go the city. They showed me on a map. I'll be going as the bag boy apparently.

I'm stealing the map if I can lay my hands on it.

Am I excited? Big, glorious lights, spectacular shows and wild and whacky things? Hell yes!

And no, Jeb, I ain't coming back.

Oh yeah. Jeb is the name of my shovel. Well, we spent so much time together… its hard not to get attached to a trusty piece of hard…

Okay, okay, I'll knock off the wood jokes…

* * *

There's trouble in River City.

Yep, that's right, Trouble right here, starts with T that rhymes with P that stands for...

And that's all the Broadway references you're going to get out of me, cause I ain't that kinda gal.

My penis has, once again, led me into a dark and scary place.

Stop that.

I am, as they say, on the first boat outta Dodge.

I will state categorically that I am not a skanky hoe. I am just a product of my environment and my historical setting that I was raised in. I don't even like sex very much.

Bet you didn't expect that six inches of wood coming straight at ya! And that was just my nose! Okay, it is a big whopping lie: I am terribly fond of sex, but I certainly don't do it very often.

I would love a relationship and 2.5 kids and a house full of Ikea products, but sometimes, when people are trying to shoot, stab, kidnap, brainwash, gut and exterminate you, it's tough to find the time to 'meet the right guy' and get a cup of coffee. So, every once in a while I get the urge and after another eight weeks of frustrated nights I may finally go hunting for a little relief. There's nothing wrong with that. A _hoe de la skank_ I am not, I say.

Really.

And don't give me that look.

I hate that look.

Stop. Now.

It was in a park. No, it was in an alley…. Or was it the back of a truck?

Well, piss off and go stereotype your own ass, cause I'm betting it's big and hairy. I met someone in a bar, had a couple of drinks and walked back to his place. It's the same perfectly _normal_ thing that people do all over and all throughout history.

His name was Jonathan (that's what it sounded like… about the only thing around here that I recognize as anything resembling English appears to be proper nouns). I had gotten bored hanging around the hotel with 'Dad' and the rest of the gang, so I wandered around staring at banks and churches and things before winding up at the bar.

I say bar… but… a bar is a bar is a bar….

When is a bar not a bar?

When it's this place.

I can't really describe it… it's like the place was desperately trying to be a bar with all its might. It had tables and glasses and stools and, yes, a bar with people mingling about smiling, chatting and playing board games with babies on their laps in a remarkably smoke-free atmosphere.

I was very confused.

So of course I went inside. I attempted to order some form of what looked like vodka but turned out to be birch beer, of the root beer ilk. My language skills evidently needed work but I was too tired to try and get an actual drink out of the bartender. Not that I had any money to pay for the one I had in hand, mind. But I figured that would be a battle for after I had actually drunk it.

Most of the locals were pretty unsavory. No, that's not true… they all looked like 'Dad's, the father-type, which was never really my thing. Sides, spanking didn't appear to be on their minds in the slightest. Every so often one of their wives would sidle up to them, give them a hug and then giggle their way back to their board games.

I had just drained the last of my sarsaparilla and last drop of hope when I spotted Jonathan staring out the back window. He had on some jean-like pants that were very tight fitting and he had on another of those glorious cotton farmer tees. Straw-blond hair, blue eyes, chiseled features just like all the rest of them. Unlike all the rest of them, however, Jonathan was in the same room as me and, apparently, wife-free. I managed to catch his eye (by staring steadily at him for ten minutes) and sauntered over. He smiled as everyone in this place seems to do all day long and watched my approach with a humorous expression. His smile got even broader as I tried, using napkins and saltshakers, to explain my adventures to date using only mime-gestures and acrobatic eyebrows.

Things seemed to be going well; at least his smile appeared to be genuine. And as closing time came and another glorious purple sunset began to fill the sky, we continued to converse with flailing hands and goggling eyes. He even paid for my drink.

At some point we wound up back at his place, laughing and giggling and we collapsed on the couch. I remember I let out a big sigh as I stared into his face, so happy after all those months of being alone that I had finally found someone to be with. To touch, to hold, to be held. I reached out and pushed aside a strand of his hair out of his lovely blue gaze. He looked at me with genuine curiosity that was desperately cute.

And yes, I kissed him. And yes, one of my hands may or may not have done something mostly inappropriate. Nothing can be proven.

But still, I hardly think screaming was the appropriate response.

Kids today.

* * *

When I uncurled from my fetal position on the floor of the living room I was surrounded by all of Jonathan's brothers, mothers, cousins, sisters and fathers. And the look on their faces-

I don't think I've ever seen that expression before. Although I've seen it a great deal since.

When the shouting started I was glad that I had not yet removed my hands from my ears.

* * *

I'm going to kill him.

I'll admit I can be a bit slow. The farmhouse thing is okay, I understand. The town? Fine. The city…

I suppose the name of the city was Marriott should have clued me in. Or the Pepsi Island Centerport.

I thought the city was composed entirely of these religious nuts. An outpost. A nice isolated region. A blip on the map.

And it was.

A blip on the planet Bringham-Young.

I'm in some sort of prison cell awaiting what I can only guess will be a trial, although I use that word loosely.

He's gone and left me stranded on a planet composed entirely of Mormons.

I'm going to kill him.


	2. Chapter 2

There are five big furry white things up there.

Out of the eight trillion, six hundred billion, four hundred and eighty-two million, thirty two thousand, five hundred and forty-six stars that are visible in this part of the galaxy, I can see five furry white snowflakes.

I miss being able to see.

My contacts are in their case… not quite sure where I'll find replacements out here. My glasses are still (I think?) by my bed at home, under my crinkled copies of the Economist and Discover magazine. On the wooden bedside table Dad helped me build when I started high school. With the sticker on the back of the Bionic Man that I haven't quite managed to completely scrape off.

Another world, another time.

My nose is cold.

I guess I can still stare up at the furry little guys… for now. After I lose my contacts or they tear I suppose I'll just… die? Whee. Funny how far I've come and how badly the little things can still screw me over.

Mormon boy is snoring. Very loudly. I'm tempted to do think of something nasty to do with his flashlight and his left nostril, but there's no way I'm leaving this bag. Not even to pee. Our drinking water has been frozen ever since we crashed. I'm guessing it's a good twenty below zero out here. My contact case is tucked in my underwear, but don't tell anyone.

My world consists of what I can see through this little opening of my sleeping bag: i.e. The Fab Five Furries.

Who am I kidding? My 'world' shouldn't have gravity on it. Let alone a breathable atmosphere on it.

I use the world 'gravity' loosely: here gravity is more like weather. It comes and goes, in gusts and bursts and clouds and eddies and will'o the wisps. At first it was kinda cute, but now it's just downright annoying. My sleeping bag is currently anchored with a pylon to sedimentary rock (which implies weathering, water and compaction. Its sedimentary dear Watson)?!?!?

Mind, you if another 'gravity downpour' of nine g's occurs again I fear for the state of my bladder.

Mark wanted to throw that table away for years. I found it stashed in the garage once and another time it got buried in the basement under his fishing gear. Not up to his art deco taste, I suppose. But I still think that he was secretly a Bionic Man fan…

I wish I had gotten a better view of this place before the crash. Not only can I still not read the language but I couldn't even see any data ports, only what I could see out of the viewer window. It helped that it took eight weeks to reach it of course. By that point Jailor Jack here was so bored I thought he was going to break out a future version of Uno and make me play. I got to move about a couple of rooms on ship. It wasn't like I was going anywhere.

This world is so strange. Our pod shouldn't have survived the crash in one piece, yet neither it nor us have a scratch. Which is only mildly impossible. Throw in the breathable atmosphere, the oh-so convenient overhead lighting provided by the electromagnetic gaseous clouds and Freaky-Friday gravity and there's a whole bunch of frozen cookie dough chunks in your ice cream bowl of impossibilities.

I think I lost where I was going with that. I'm a little hungry.

Of course, if the atmosphere turns out to be poisonous... or we're baking in UV radiation...

Either way my boogers are still frozen solid.

* * *

Oh hell.

My upper lip is welded to my sleeping bag zipper.

Altar Boy is still snoring.

I guess 'boy' is the wrong word. I'm just throwing nouns around really. Adjectives? Grammar, good at, I'm not. He's the same age as me; the wrong side of twenty-nine. I can tell he's scared out of his mind. I keep expecting him to go 'gibber gibber' a lot. But pretty much after the crash we walked until we could walk no more and then we fell asleep. Standard method of dealing with shock: lose yourself in physical activity till you pass out and hope that when you wake up it was all a bad dream.

I used to do that a lot, now that I think about it.

I think I hate him so much cause I've been trying to hate the guy this entire voyage and I still haven't come up with a decent reason to hate him. Yes, he's my 'guard' and I'm his 'prisoner' but he's just so damn nice. He actually took the cuffs off when I told him they were chafing. Took. Off. The. Cuffs. I almost guilted myself into putting them back on. He's just so damn _accommodating_ that it makes it completely impossible and unreasonable to hate him.

That doesn't stop me trying to hate him, it just irks me to the point of nearly hating him.

And he's more attractive than me, better chest, ass and, although he has got to be the same age as me, he looks five years younger. Clean living, can't beat it. That is not to say, however, that he's the cleverest fox in the hunt. He'd probably try to bake the dogs and horsies some nice muffins if he met them in the woods.

Still, I do appreciate the fact that he pushed me into the escape pod with him. Very sweet, considering he was in full 'gibber' mode at that point. Mind you, he still had enough wits about him to make sure I was not, at any time, physically touching him. He'd been doing that the whole cruise. That look that said he'd rather I was a homicidal maniac than just a… a… deviant? Not sure these people even have word for me. Not any more. Genetic clean up must have taken care of that ages ago. No doubt a Godsend... to play God.

I'd take offense if I wasn't enjoying it so much. It's almost like being back home again.

Mark and I used to make out in on the bus stop in La Jolla to watch people gawk. We'd give each other points if we could cause the breeders to trip as they walked by. We managed to cause an Audi to crash once. We each got fifty points for that one.

We couldn't afford cable.

I wish I had gotten a look at some topos of this place. Or at least a layout of the gravity anomalies of this thing. The only plan I've come up with so far is to hike to where the bits of spaceship are still falling. That's Fab Five Number Three. Or Jai. Very much like the old Christmas story with the three wise men. Except I could never stand Jai.

Maybe someone there is still alive. Maybe that someone has an interstitial transmitter capable of calling for a rescue ship or a passing transport. Maybe we can make it out of here alive. Maybe they have developed the technology to send me back home to sixty-four Evergreen Terrace four hundred years in the past.

And maybe L.A. will be swallowed by lava flows.

The furry guys are gone now. Blue cloudy things are blocking my view. When I had my eyes in I assumed they were probably ionized gaseous gravity-driven dust clouds that constitute the stratospheric equivalent of the 'sky' here. But without my CibaSoft lenses slapped on my cornea, they're just blue cloudy things. Except when the lighting arcs between them. I think it's the only lighting this place has here. When one sparks it changes the color of the cloud and somehow solidifies the particles in it, turning the cloud into one of those glowing waxy blobs in one of those tacky lava lamps my older brother used to think was so cool. Once the charge is gone it reverts to its gaseous phase in a sort of stratocumulus way.

It's like being trapped in the world's largest discotheque.

With a Mormon.

Oh, and aliens.

I forgot about the aliens.


	3. Chapter 3

The trading station was a deeply exciting and exotic place filled with people from the far reaches of the system who were involved in intricate trading deals, diplomatic missions and thrilling adventures.

I'm just guessing here because all I got to see was the food court. Work with me. I was a prisoner at the time. I got to see three corridors, an airlock and the 'bathroom' such as it was. And a cell disguised a broom closet that they locked me in for a couple of hours.

The food court was, obviously, the best bit. I got to people watch. I generally hate people but watching them is always a good time.

My prison cell on the cruiser did not have cable.

Or even Tetris for that matter.

The people were, well, tall. I can't think of a better way to put it. Here I was stuck in a way cool futuristic setting with glowing table tops and all and the best my mind can come up with is to fixate on how I short I felt at a decent five foot ten. Their skin was a bit of a leopard mix… not that they had spots but that there were people of every shade of brown, cream and tan dotting the place. Altered Boy and I were the only whities in the place, which was kind of a welcome changed after Planet Pepsi.

The clothes were remarkably conservative, which I found mildly disappointing. I was hoping for either tight-fitting jump suits or perhaps everyone traipsing around in golden thongs, but a combination of sweats and coveralls seemed to dominate the station.

Damn you Flash Gordon with your false promises and glittery sets. Mind you, I've been traveling around space for awhile now and never seen that stuff, but I'm always hoping.

Curly hair, red hair, brown dreds, crew cuts crowning aristocratic noses, low brow inbred foreheads, silly ears, glacier chins, you name it and someone there had it. An E-bay of cartilage and bone possibilities strolled about, munching, shoplifting and chatting. And not one of them was under six feet.

I'm getting a little Napoleonic here I guess, but it did bug me.

I only got to people watch for about fifteen minutes before Altered Boy came back with boxes piled high some sort of burritos and we headed back to the transport vessel _Hope_.

Did I mention that they weren't used to prisoners? Either that or I was just deemed to be very, very unthreatening.

Which, again, made me feel short.

It didn't occur to me until much later that the entire futuristic, interstellar space station was ships docked from the furthest reaches of deep space was jam packed full of people.

People.

And nothing else.

* * *

The patch on his coveralls read 'OKOCHOBE.'

His name, I think, is Devon.

I worked that bit out by reading some of his mail.

And yes, I feel terribly guilty and horrible about invading my captors' privacy. Just terrible. And I'd feel much worse if I could read any of the language, but after staring at some of his letters for hours, the only bit I could understand was 'Devon.'

Devon Okochobe.

Which, considering the founder of his religion, and probably race, was named John Smith, I found Devon Okochobe to be remarkably refreshing.

I also found it to be very useful in getting him to stop screaming when he saw the aliens. I think they feed off the electromagnetic discharges between the 'clouds.'

They appear, mostly, to be sort of airborne translucent dolphins, about one hundred meters across. I think I saw a baby one, he was only thirty meters from nose to tail.

They are so goddamn cute.

Devon threw rocks at them.

His aim was crap though. In a constantly fluctuating gravity environment I guess I can't blame his throwing arm.

I'm not sure if they actually flew or swam through the 'sky'. They were semi-translucent, their organs concentrated glowing worms that twisted beneath their skin. They seemed to travel in packs. I have no idea where they came from. One minute there was just barren blue rock and purple sky, the next the sky was a trailer park for double wides… All flying, ducking and hurtling through the air.

Before I could even think of the possibility, one of them swam into a gravity pocket.

It was the coolest thing ever. I'm starting a Fan Club as soon as I don't die.

The little guy had numerous red palm-size pods suspended within its the saran wrap skin. The pods slowly vented the red fluid into the body. The puss dispersed throughout the creature, changing the deep blue hue into a riot of purples. The skin changed as the chemical progressed- hardening, the sac crystallizing to a solid substance that gleamed in the light of the flickering aurora. The tendrils merged together to create jointed triangular projections, the top dome projecting a pinnacle to form a large pyramid, the edges forming crisp lines until they touched the ground as large ant-like legs. As they flexed against the rocks, it strolled along as it if was the most natural thing in the world. As soon as it hit another gravity pocket, presto chango the pods reformed and it was a gliding dolphin again.

I so wanted to ride one.

Devon got caught in a zero-g bubble on his third rock throw. It left him spinning and kicking and grabbing wildly for more rocks. And screaming. Screaming the whole time.

At the time I thought maybe the creatures were poisonous or carnivores or something,so I stopped trying to tempt one with my granola bar, but I am convinced that now that it wasn't the reason Devon went all Anne Heche on me.

I didn't work out why until just now.

That entire space station was teeming with life. Positively oozed of it, simply reeked of it inside every polished bolt and molybdenum-coated viewing port. Rammed with every shape and size of people.

Of people.

Nothing but humans.

I've been not only been wanting to see aliens but _expecting_ to see them.

Devon has just had his entire world, religion and synapses blown out the back of his head.

And was throwing rocks.

Gotta love humans.

* * *

Devon has stopped snoring. Only because he woke up though.

The three wise man have lost Ringo. Our Starr has gone.

Well, maybe not three wise men. A fag and a moron.

Opps. Did I just go and leave that 'm' out again? Silly me.

Oh yeah, two men and an alien.

They're all gone now. I've lost sight of them. Which is slightly disconcerting since most of them were the size of my high school.

There is one of the aliens that didn't leave though. He keeps circling above us. Occasionally he goes off and does his own thing and then swoops back, skimming just over our heads and shooting off into the distance in front of us. He always comes back though.

I call him Ray.

Devon continues to throw rocks at him.

Well, not really, but he always has a rock handy and stares at Ray like its about to do something horribly nasty to him.

Mind you, Devon gives me that same look half the time. He still doesn't trust me yet. Fortunately trust has nothing to do with any of this. We just walk. And walk and walk.

These survival suits have some pretty funky insoles. They are so very much like the Moon Boots I had as a kid that it is slightly unnerving. The sleeping bags fit in a pouch the size of my wallet, which I would have killed for in Scouts. Best of all the suits have an internal heating system.

A system that took Devon six hours to remember to show me.

Not that I'm bitter.

So far I have seen huge transport ships, various planets, nebulae, black holes, wormholes, collapsing time funnels… but on this trip, I have yet to see toilet paper.

I've been watching Devon very closely on that point, but as of yet there have been no developments. We've been stranded here for sixteen hours now and I have to applaud his colon, but mine isn't up to the challenge for very much longer.

Sixteen hours. Sixteen hours and we are still no closer to the crash sites.

I'm actually pleased in a perverse way about that.

I have this nasty feeling I won't want to see what's actually there…


	4. Chapter 4

The viewing port flashed white.

I saw it.

I don't know how. I was hanging upside down from my bunk with blood from my mouth pouring in my eyes. The sudden temperature and pressure differential caused my fillings to crack my back molars with a vicious _snap_

I'm surprised the gravity regulators were still active after the initial blasts.

I'm surprised we were still alive.

Devon was outside the'cell' door, slamming his fist against the emergency over-ride switch- punching, kicking the red two-inch panel. Frost was everywhere and the rushing gas clouds raped my ears with their roaring.

We weren't dead yet. Part of the vessel,lost structural integrity and all the secondary hatchways were sealed, keeping segments of the ship roughly intact.

Intact meaning the ship was filled with toxic gasses, sewage, and rampant fires that gulped up the remaining oxygen while plummeting at two hundred kilometers to the surface, but we weren't being sucked out into vacuum.

_Hope_ was a tough bitch to kill.

Devon managed to punch the release with a handy spork.

He bolted into the cell to grab me.

And flew three feet backwards through the air, bounced off the metal wall andfell onto me. Almost. The invisible force manacles that kept me a meter away from him caused him to hover over me.

I think he actually swore.

I have _got_ to learn this language.

It's gone Mark. I'm sorry.

I saw it fall through the air in slow motion. I could see the broken chain whip through the clasp. Saw the faces flashing at me as it turned through the air. Saw the glass shatter as it impacted against the cold grey of the steel flooring tiles. The springs and gears spouting out of the back of the fob. Our picture inside the little door skittering across the floor and slipped down into the grate.

Devon slapped a control on his wrist and collapsed on the floor around me, his breath on my neck the only warm sensation in my body. I felt his body give a subtle shudder at my touch, but then he gave a giant _heave_ to wrest me to my feet and pushed me through the door. We stumbled through empty corridors, coughing, hacking, blinded by the caustic fog that was everywhere, following the green holograms that sputtered with emergency power, andcollapsed against the 'lock of an escape pod. Devon kicking at the door, screaming silent screams, spit flying upwards and then the release finally gave-

-along with the door, the wall, the ceiling, the pod. And us.

We tumbled out of the bowels of _Hope_ and plummeted towards the awesome landscape of below.

I was kicking, screaming and choking in my own frozen blood and vomit but I didn't really care.

Somewhere up there, trapped in the door of the fob watch, is a photograph of two young men kissing under the tower of Hero's Square in Budapest.

Mark, I'm sorry.

I lost the last bit of you I had left.

* * *

I've done free-fall once.

I've been pushed off cliffs more times than is strictly believable but I've only dropped from twelve thousand feet once.

Sky diving, twenty first birthday. I'd wanted to sit and read my new Kate Orman book. My fraternity had other plans for me. I don't remember much, the guy strapped to my back did most of the work-

-don't even think about going there-

so that all I had to do was arch my back and clasp my arms to my chest-

-can we _please_ move on?-

and then we were out of the door of the plane and my body and my brain both sort of did the same thing my Chewbacca figure did when I put him in the microwave: melted into a twisted, frozen, useless lump. A twisted, frozen, useless lump that was lodged in my throat.

It didn't stop me screaming though.

I screamed this time too. But this time there was no one on my back. There was no parachute. Only land screaming up towards me, the skin of my cheeks and eyelids flapping around me. Raw space shredding my eardrums. Blue rock spiking upwards.

For fifteen thousand, six hundred and ninety five feet. I know this because I shouted the f-word over three hundred times.

I clawed at the air, kicked, twisted, passed out and came to again, screaming all the while.

And then I drifted into a near zero g well and settled lightly on a mesa that resembled a tableau of Elvis' backside.

The escape pod fluttered to rest, the door still open, a hundred meters away with a gentle thump.

It was another half hour before I realized that Devon was next to me. He had fallen with me, his 'manacle's ever keeping me at arms length away, and near, him. He must have reactivated it at some point.

And, just like on my twenty-first birthday, I swore violently up and down that I would never ever do something so stupid and orgasmic as free fall again.

Probably.

* * *

The Fab Four are back again. Weren't there five Beatles to begin with and one didn't quite make it before they got famous? And then, one by one, they slipped away.

I'm not really a fan of the group but I can't seem to get them out of my head right now.

It could be that I'm just desperately trying not to think about the cold.

So begins Night Two. Devon has struck up the Snore band.

I've moved my bag much farther away this time.

I got to do some lead climbing today. I'm almost started caring what happens to me again. Or at least helping Devon climb distracted me from, well, me. He's quite good, once he got the hang of it, although I had to do some miming to get him put his weight on his legs and not to rely solely on his arms.

I have to admit, Devon is actually quite clever. He managed to adjust the limit distance for the 'manacles.' I still would have French-kissed Roseanne for some ropes, pitons, and a harness (isn't that an interesting visual?) but we managed to scale the face of the plateau using these force fields. It was only two hundred meters or so, but it took nearly five hours.

I think Devon was mildly impressed.

Ray has been gone all day. I think the smell has driven him away.

Our guiding celestial light twinkling above is gone now. It's been replaced by sputtering grease fires that spew a putrescent orange glow against the bottoms of the constantly transmogrifying clouds. I've tied a scrap of my sleeping bag across my nose and mouth. It helps against the clothes but mainly the scent of my own breath, blood and sweat keeps my mind off the smog of burned flesh and fuel that coats and spills down from the plateau.

We were lucky. The mesa (a layer cake of blue, green and canary colored sedimentary strata- again, another implausibility) must have easily been three hundred meters high, but bits of the vessel had blown miniature craters out of the sides of the steep cliffs. Bits of the ship… and escape pods. There isn't much left of them except for little puddles of frozen titanium that huddle in the center of their impact bowls. What little that wasn't vaporized but had been saved by gravity burps were scattered about inside the craters; rods, oxygen tanks, arms, legs, shoes all of them pointed towards the center like some huge, morbid grandfather clock.

We kept walking.

Tomorrow's the day. We're almost there.

If only I could sleep.

I don't think I can face the dreams again.

So far I've managed to treat all this like something you would see on the Discover Channel or read in a Jules Verne rip-off. It has kept me sane so far, I hope.

But to Devon this isn't some 'adventure,' this is his time, his people, his reality.

A reality that could really, deeply, kill him.

And me too for that matter.

I think I just don't really care about any of it anymore. I'm a little too lost this time. I'm not sure how to get back to… to a time? A place?

My friends are dead, my parents are dead, my pets are dead, Trent Reznor is dead, Mark is dead, my car is dead.

Dead, dead, dead.

And not me. Not yet. Waiting to die. Killing time.

I'm not going to fall asleep. I'm going to lie here and listen to the snorin' Mormon and walk and freeze and starve and die alone but I'm not going to sleep.

I'm done with dreaming.


	5. Chapter 5

I slept, of course, but I didn't dream. At least I don't remember dreaming.

I kept waking without knowing why.

The snores continued.

That might have something to do with it.

Sometimes you don't have to be Jessica Fletcher.

I sighed loudly a couple of times, in the hopes of disturbing his rhythm.

Nothing.

I sighed again and turned to look at the ground below my head.

His alien phobia still puzzled me. Or at least the complete lack of aliens puzzled me. Was I in a distant sector where there were no aliens? Had they all been killed? Or was this an earlier time and a version of the universe where men never encountered aliens?

It wouldn't surprise me. Nothing was stable any more. Time, worlds and fashion had been shifting about lately. Everything was unstable. Smeghead (aka the guy who dumped me here) was looking for a way to stabilize everything. To help his friend.

But he left me just when we were getting close.

Now I'm not sure what to do or how to even get off this rock. I was hoping there would be a comms unit in the wreckage, but now...

I sighed again, just because.

Without my contacts, I am nearly completely blind. Almost. Unless things are about four inches from my face and then everything is amazingly clear.

My optometrist suggested I be a jeweler.

My mom was really into the idea to, for obvious reasons.

But it was at this distance that I really started to get into the sand, really get deep with the grains.

And yes, I was very deeply bored.

The sand was made up of fine-grained pink-white crystals, with numerous striations that streaked across the surface as if someone had scratched them against my old house keys. One or two were the size of my fingernail.

I reached out and plucked it up, twisting it in the faint purple light of the sky.

I'm not sure exactly why I did what I did next, all I can say is that I remembered something from college about massive seas evaporating over time and leaving behind dry seas of salt. And that you could tell which was which by licking them. You had to be careful that someone didn't just drip HCL on them to test for calcite before you licked… but it was my fave part of the class.

So I licked the crystal.

And before I thought I was having bad _dreams_….

It was a monster. It was hideous. It was screaming. It was dying. It was alive. It was being killed. It was never there.

And then I took my tongue off and the image was gone out of my head, like someone hit eject on the DVD and I was starting and the gentle, blue SONY default screen.

I picked up a different rock and popped the whole thing in my mouth.

It was a woman. A warrior. A mother. A girl. Afraid. Defiant. Victorious. In battle dress. A corpse. Bathing. A whore. A saint. Crying. Sleeping.

The crystal dissolved. My throat tingled, sparkling with energy and adrenaline.

I pulled both arms out of my sleeping bag and started to sweep the sand around me in great strokes, amassing a pile around my head.

I noticed that the snores had stopped. I could feel his eyes on me as he watched me shovel sand into my mouth, but there isn't have time to explain. I will, perhaps, explain later. If he asks nicely. When he learns English.

As the crystals dissolved in my mouth, my mind flickered with tastes and sensations of a thousand people, places, times… history exploded and poured various iterations into my head and my body was staggering with the burden of Truth unleashed. Of history sublimating into knowledge in my body.

Even as the images faded and the world around me stuttered and flickered as my senses struggled to regain control, I dug deeper into the sand, scooping and scraping, looking for what I knew would be there.

It took me less than a minute to find the hard, crystalline surface. Brushing away the remaining earth I could see that I was right. I had found what we were looking for before the dumped me on Planet Mormon.

Beneath my hands was a window looking into the center of this hollow world. Faces of men, aliens and beasts clawed from within, their translucent hands, claws and teeth tearing against the hard crystalline rock to get at me, but they could not break through.

This was the world Smeghead and I had been looking for all this time.

The world the he left me stranded to find on his own.

Well I got here first, Smeghead. I think it's time you call me Master, for a change, don't you?

I know you can hear me, I haven't been dictating into this chip in my brain to sell to the Spartacus Travel Guide when I get back. Now would be a great time to bring the TARDIS and that creep of a Doctor here.

And do hurry, dear friend.

I still haven't found any toilet paper.


	6. Chapter 6

The night was cold, colder than ever.

Yet, despite the chilly temperature, I lay sweating in my bag, my shirt wet and sticky.

I was waiting. I had been waiting for so long.

The sky was hidden, the stars obscured in shifting layers of purple mist.

Without the light, my other senses tingled with awareness.

I didn't hear his approach, but I felt his moist breath on my neck.

Felt Jonathan's fingers tremble as he tugged at the release straps.

Felt him slipinside my sleeping bag and lie next to me, his muscular flesh shockingly soft and yielding to my touch.

Time seemed to melt as our lips brushed with the electricity of a thousand suns as we gave in to the lust and yearning that had burned between us for so long.

At last we kissed as I dreamed that we had, voer and over, and we would be together forever under a thousand alien suns-

Oh, _please_.

This is so not that kind of story.

Just seeing if you were paying attention, cause Smeghead sure as hell isn't.

Close your mouth. There you go. Now, back to business.

Ten minutes. That's all I waited. After all, how long do you wait for a Lord of Time?

Obviously he isn't listening. Especially after that last bit. The question is, is the Master still out there and he just can't pick up the signal on this thing or is his metal host body gone? Did it ever exist? Is he dead?

The universe is so unstable right now, anything is possible. In fact, all the possibilities are happening at once. And if he's not listening to me, who is? Who am I talking to? Why do my tenses keep shifting? Is this present, past, future, imperfect…?

Feels like a very tense situation.

And who will play me in the audio book version when they find this chip?

I vote for Tom Selleck, but I'm biased.

If only…

It should tell you something that I'm traveling (was traveling) with the Master because he's the saner, gentler, more rational of the two choices.

To be fair, before I hit the scene the Doctor lost a number of companions. I think he was having a midlife crisis when we met. I don't think any of his other incarnations lasted long enough to have one of those.

Imagine dying eight or nine times before really having to wonder what happens next after the next three deaths?

What an odd statement.

Throw in the fact that he'd lost his memory, regained his memory, regenerated (or did he?), fallen in love, never loved, yanked forward, backwards, regenerated at the wrong times, at the right times… a thousand different universes all created by jerking his past around, manipulating it, almost as if it was alldoneto make life more interesting for the rest of us.

The end result: rude, arrogant, suicidal, homicidal and well, in short, the Doctor was, is.. a bit of an ass.

Which is why I'm here.

Sitting with an innocent by-standard in a world of Fact, untouchable by the likes of your average Type-40 TT capsule.

No one as rational as a Time Lord could stand where I'm standing. Only a human could be so irrational as to stand it.

The Master explained it to me. But not very well.

The world I'm standing on only has conceptual mass. It's as big as a black hole and as small as a rasberry muffin.

It is everything and nothing.

You step out of your car one day and get shot.

Clearly this is murder.

But if you were a leader, murder becomes Revolution.

An Assassin becoming a Liberator.

An assault becomes a pre-emptive strike.

A village idiot becomes a great political mind.

Hack ragged crosses into the surface of ancient hieroglyphics, scratch off the old names and rename the gods.

Zeus becomes Jupiter.

Warriors in Nepal become eternally peaceful monks.

Failure becomes Triumph, genocide becomes Means.

History makes Names, gives importance to Locations and re-defines the Past. Winners take pre-emptive measures to ensure the proper versions of events are passed on.

With each lick of the brush, media re-interprets the past, through word of mouth, text books, data cubes, each lick repainting the picture, from a crystal clear digital photograph smeared into a soft Monet or a gaping Edvard Munch.

Each fact is shunted away, compressed and hidden by a billion minds of a thousand trillion races to forming a mass of rejected concepts that happen to be Truth collapsing upon the weight of themselves to become an event horizon of Events.

I'm standing on a world where Facts came to die. A black hole of truth, imprisoned in a tectonic shell of interpretations and revisions… are the dolphins guards or dreams? Are they the Truth seeking freedom or are they the dreamers seeking?

All these thoughts trolled through my head as I lay in my bag. Jonathan stared back at me- he'd given up pretending to be asleep after I had eaten a couple of pounds of rocks.

I don't blame him. I'm starting to freak myself out. I'm still going to kill him. The Master that is (if you are listening somehow). Leaving me knowing my libido would get me imprisoned – I am NOT THAT PREDICTABLE damnit, and shuttled to this sector in space and conveniently crashing… it would have been nice to have been in on the plan.

And what about all the other passengers?

Were they the price?

Is the Doctor worth that price?

Would he think he was worth it (if he wasn't insane?).

And more importantly, how the hell am I going to get the f out of here with out even a ! Swiss Army knife?

Right about now, I'd kill for a cunning plan.

Baldric, where are you when I need you?


	7. Chapter 7

I can't move my fingers.

Feel so heavy. So tired.

I'd like to think there wasn't another way.

But I'm not sure.

I'm not an evil mastermind.

But I'm starting to understand the stress they must be under.

I'm not sure if I'll survive this. I'm not supposed to be here. I'm pretty sure that this can't even happen.

It seems to be working though. I can't move my arms now.

One evil mastermind actually thought this one through.

That must be a first for him.

His first, my last.

Oh hell.

* * *

After my little epiphany about where I was, I tried to sleep. Tried to calm down and sleep.

Wasn't having any luck though.

I lay there, staring up at stars I couldn't really even see.

I picked up a small crystal and balanced it on the end of my nose.

It was the perfect distance: I could see the cleavage faces, the striations inlaid on the amber surface.

All the imperfections.

I couldn't see whose history was trapped within though.

Somewhere in this wild world was a crystal for each of us. One my parents embedded me within, one lacquered layer at a time. That it took so long for me to break free of.

One for Mark.

One boulder probably for Jonathan's entire religion.

Possibly a substantial land mass.

Visions of imaginary continental shelves of truth shifting under a sea of contrived history filled my head and lulled me to sleep.

My last sight was of Jonathan, who it seemed, was already fast asleep.

* * *

My head is turned on its side now. I can't move it any more, but I can see the 'sand' just beneath my cheek.

I can see the process actually happening as it emerges from the ground around me.

It was hard to describe it… it was so _organic_.

If you get real close to the mirror, grab your nostrils and squeeze the skin along the ridge of your nose together, watch what happens.

Or should I say that's what happened.

Columns of crystalline sludge slowly erupted from the ground around me, excreting a viscous fluid that enveloped my body. Pulling me into the earth.

All part of my cunning plan.

Well, not _my_ cunning plan. My cunning plan would have involved a stealth missile and me in bed watching my Wonderfalls dvds.

But as I said, I'm not the evil mastermind.

* * *

His face looked so innocent. Pale cheeks were covered with the faintest white dander.

His lashes filaments of gold.

His beauty was marred only by the occasional guttural snore. But somehow it made him more human. Touchable.

Attainable.

I placed the food bars into the mess sack and gently pulled down the zipper of his sleeping bag.

He didn't stir.

I pulled open the insulated fabric and beheld his body.

I realized I really was trembling.

I knew what I had to do- what I wanted to do.

And I was amazed by how strong my desire really was.

* * *

The stuff is reaching my lips now. I'm starting to panic. I'll admit it. In theory this wasn't a problem, but of course in theory I could have grown up to be a neurosurgeon.

It was just those twenty or so years of achingly hard work that I was desperately avoiding.

Now I'm just desperately avoiding being suffocated.

* * *

I stripped off my shorts and slid into the bag next to him.

His snoring stopped and I was sure I had woken him.

I lay still, but my flesh was pressed against his. I listened to his breathing and tried to match it. It was so regular, so controlled, I knew he was awake.

I just hoped he couldn't sense my fear.

Slowly, carefully, my fingers began to explore.

* * *

I felt it crawl over my lips, wrap round my tongue with its thick, crackling syrup and pour down my throat.

I'd love to panic.

I can't move. I can't scream. I can't think.

I want to breathe. But I know I can't.

Mark, I'm sorry.

* * *

His sharp intake of breath that erased any pretense of being asleep.

Even in the dark of night I saw his eyes flash open.

And the shutters slammed down.

He pushed me away and repelled me with a look of disgust. Mixed with fear and loathing.

I scooted back, hurt. He was much larger than me. Much stronger. But I wasn't terrified of anything he could do to me. I was hurt because of after all we had been through, after the last few days he had begun to treat me with respect, unlike all the others, and he had started to see me as a person and not the criminally insane. A leper.

But now that curtain of revulsion had returned. I was less than a person again.

As he gathered his things and stomped off away into the night I crawled back to my sleeping bag and wanted to start hating the Master.

But I was too tired. Too depressed.

I lay on my back and waited.

* * *

I'm completely covered now. The stars are fading as this world pulls me into itself.

I remember now how I figured out the Master's little cunning plan.

Before my little midnight rendezvous I woke up in the middle of the night, still staring at Jonathan.

It clicked then, I think.

Not really clicking, more like slamming the car door against my fingers over and over again while a bulldozer simultaneously scraped my head off my neck.

I understood.

Not 'understanding' the way that some people comprehend quantum mechanics, mathematic equations, visions or poems, just that same overwhelming sensation felt when you fall from a great height. The same understanding that is rammed through your whole body, mind and soul when you're pushed into a flaming pit of lava: whether you're a cat, a spider monkey or a Bolivian flight attendant: you're going to die and you know exactly how.

Differentiation is not required.

It was Jonathan.

The Master had ensured all these random events would come to pass.

Jonathan wasn't an accident.

He was the key into this world.

I can be a bit slow sometimes.

Like, for instance now, as I'm being absorbed into the ground by some horrid, crystalline mucus. Being pulled into this world.

This world of Truth smothered by lies, fears and fictions. Assumptions, omissions and contrived prejudices.

It would have been simplicity itself for me to lithify Jonathan into the earth with my leanings. But to get him to actively wish _me_ into this bizarre earth it was necessary to cause him to lash out with his own innate fears and prejudices. To smother me with readily available lies and what generations had taught him.

I've emotionally traumatized an innocent person who could probably have been a good friend. Who the more he hates me, the deeper I go. The deeper I must go.

And now…. Now, I'm sinking into the strata of reality.

I'm not an evil mastermind. I only work for one. And, in theory, this mission was supposed to be a Good mission. For the good guys. For all the good guys. And one evil mastermind.

I hope he likes peanut butter.

Somewhere on the surface of this strange world is an beautiful young man who's so innocent that it breaks my heart to think I've soiled it.

Somewhere in this crust, I'm suffocating, not breathing, not existing, cocooned. Deaf, dumb and freaking out…

Somewhere in this mantle of infinite mass is the one person, the one truth I'm looking for. The one fact I'm trying to find.

How hard can it be?


	8. Chapter 8

Falling.

Sinking.

Drowning.

Into the center of the world.

I remember the Doctor saying that gravity can bend light and shred worlds, but it's nowhere near as strong as the EM force that holds our little bits together. The little bits that make up our molecules, our hair, our Toyotas and our burritos. In between the little bits is nothing but empty space. This tiny invisible force is the only thing preventing us ramming straight into the center of the earth. A whole load of nothing.

I'm in a world, a space, a void where gravity can't even exist. A world held together by denial, reinforced by propaganda. Empty space filled with microscopic facts, spun together with lies.

I know I'm doing a bad job of conveying this but it's hard to describe. Besides I'm sure it's gauche to describe being inside a metaphor with a metaphor.

And yes, I'm babbling. I do that when I'm panicking.

It's different than being on the surface. Now that I'm inside, I don't have to eat these truths to understand them any more.

They flow over and through me. Sliding into my skull. A trillion faces, images, animals, worlds…

I blame the Master. I'm sure he injected my blood stream with nanites. Or pixie dust or robotic elves. Or something.

Faced with such universal understanding I was worried that my mind would explode.

There are gods in here you know.

And innumerable other beings, facts, creatures, places.

Thankfully, humanity is such a small part of the universe, I have yet to experience a single moment of human truth. Which is probably a good thing.

There is a great deal I'd like to know. And a whole lot more that I'm probably better off not knowing.

Nonetheless, I'm just drifting.

Come to think of it, the Master never mentioned me getting out of here in the mission briefing.

Bastard.

I couldn't have done it you know. I have enough hatred in my being to think I could send Jonathan down here, to cocoon him in my own prejudice of lies, but I don't really.

Not any more.

We used to have a name for them, the broken, the walking wounded who would flee from Utah. The Bring'em Youngs. At best, their remaining ties with their families were awkward and painful, at worst they had been completely cast out and subjected to 're-habilitation.' They've stopped electro-therapy around the time I left. At least that's what they say. Of course, this is a religion that only let minorities into their religion for a tax break back in seventy-eight.

But it's not important. Not only because I just plain like the guy.

Before all this, before I met the Doctor or the Master, before Tardis's and phasers and drama… before college, before UNIT, I was a guy. Male and white. And then, suddenly I wasn't any more. I became a minority. The diseased. The different.

It's impossible to be prejudiced after that. After you become that which you used to pre-judge.

I could never have sent Jonathan into this world, because I wouldn't have believed my own lies. I think I secretly hoped that he wouldn't be able to do it either…

If I was Pinocchio my nose could have drilled through the crust of this world by now.

Ya know, sometimes I'm so full of it, I'm certain I'm going to hell.

Is there a single comment in this narrative that isn't prejudiced or stereotypical? Have I done nothing other than lambaste the poor kid and his peeps? I haven't even bothered to learn their language and I'm trapped in their universe.

In my head I'm the innocent, forthright, wronged oppressed (and smarter) one.

But in reality I probably could have shoved him through the crust at warp nine.

Knowing what's that prejudice is wrong doesn't always stop you from still thinking it, in a gut reaction way. The only way to truly eliminate it is to never be taught. I like to think I couldn't have done it, but now I'll never know.

I hope I wouldn't. I really liked the guy.

He's just a person doing what he thinks is right.

Just like the Doctor when he got Mark killed.

Doing what's right.


	9. Chapter 9

I'm an agnostic in need of a symbol.

Focusing is difficult.

I'm suffocating and yet feel no need to breathe.

I'm probably really sitting in a dark room in the TARDIS with electrodes stuck in my head.

I should be so lucky.

I need a center point.

With no other means of navigation, the only way through this is by harnessing the power of my own mind.

I am so screwed.

I'm going to be overwhelmed eventually. At one point I'll encounter truths and visions that will either fry my brain or I'll dissipate and drift into nothingness.

I'm going to die.

I said was a cunning plan, but I never said it was my cunning plan.

In here is a swastika truly a symbol of hate or does it represent its original peaceful runic form? Is a cross a form of torture or all that commercial religious blather?

I can't think of anything.

There was only one thing on my mind.

It was a scarecrow, broken and frozen in the white desert sands.

Ragged and deformed, half naked and stripped of even his shoes, the ravaged figure bled in the pale moonlight, his limbs wrapped in rusted barbed wire.

The scarecrow was crying in the frozen night, tears of crimson lava flowed to the ground in broken neon rivulets.

But wasn't just in my mind anymore.

It was there, in front of me in this mad, translucent world.

The figure grew larger as I stared at it. I was drifting closer, the other impossible images and visions grew hazy and silent. I could see his barrel chest, the slight belly, the tattooed forearms.

Try as I might I couldn't make out the face. But I knew who it was. He was still wearing his US Marine Corps fatigues.

They never found his body, so I don't know where or what he ended up looking like. We left too quickly. This is just how I imagined it.

Except for the light. It streamed out of him, coruscating in radiant waves, hiding his face in its blazing streams of white.

I wanted to know what happened. If I could just touch Mark I'd know how he really died, if it was worth it. I'd be with him again.

My hand dipped into the glare and I could taste him with my fingertips…

And that was when she appeared before me.

I expected Turlough or Ace or Roz or that tranny Trix. Someone with secrets. With history.

Yet even behind her face, swirling, shifting and masking the whiteness that lay behind her, I could see every face, of every person the Timelord had ever met. Every face from the TARDIS archive that I'd spent weeks pouring over stuttered and coalesced before me.

I waited for Mark's face to appear, but he never came.

I certainly didn't expect to see **_her_**.


	10. Chapter 10

Picture it:

Sicily, 1918.

A young woman climbs aboard a ship destined for a new and distant land. A land of hope, freedom, and low paying jobs…

Oh all right, no more Golden Girls references. Probably wasted on the anglos anyway.

Picture it:

1991, Middle East, Earth.

Monster of the Day: the Glaudennaise.

The name sounded like some sort of creame sauce, but it was actually a time-active fungus that fed off decaying timelines. According to the Doc, they hung around key nexus points in history where other time options fractured and frizzled away and fed off that energy as the timelines sublimated away from actually possible probabilities into nothing more than dreams.

Which, I really didn't have a problem with. I'm all about niche filling. Go underdog, go and all that.

But apparently it was festering and attempting to 'choke off' as the Doctor put it, the existing timeline completely.

It sounded a bit like cutting your head off to breathe better, but I guess even fungi get crazy sometime.

The thing was we needed to sneak up on it. It was able to sense our stink (time travel residue I guess, the Doc was a bit vague about that bit) and it was definitely not TARDIS friendly.

The nexus that the Glaudennaise was choking was in the middle of some battle. So Mark went undercover with a marine unit and I went in with an UNIT observation squad. We spent a few weeks undercover, scouting around and generally building up trust and getting the lay of the land. Usual stuff. Then the Doc rang us both up to tell us that February 26th, the next day was when the 'event' would go down. The Doc was… I can't really remember what he was doing, but I guess the idea was he'd tackle the thing when it manifested and improvise something per usual.

I didn't know that when the Doc called Mark he mentioned me.

I didn't know that someone in the base camp overheard the 'unimportant bit' of the converstation.

The Doctor didn't tell me until much, much later.

There was, after all, a whopping great monster to fight.

The next morning, Mark was dead.

* * *

Why do I get to face fungus and incorporeal spirits?

Ben Browder (Farscape fame folks). Why can't I face down a team of leather pants wearing, hunky, evil, sexy Ben Browders? Just once. That's all I'm asking for.

No?

Sigh.

Anyway, back to her:

At first I thought the female figure before me was Hedwig. I think it was the hair-style. Very retro. Very camp. Somehow I doubt that the Doctor ever had a drag queen as a companion, although that Kamelion certainly had some gender confusion issues.

It was Barbara Wright.

I suppose I should have expected a history teacher in here. But like a policeman, you never get one when you need one.

At least it looked like Barbara. Beneath her glowing white skin shifted the faces of a thousand other companions, all looking outward through her eyes. Another visage that repeatedly skimmed across the surface was one with all freckles and red hair. But from the stern look in Barbara's eyes, I could see no sign of Compassion within.

I suppose it made sense that it was Barbara. It was only right.

Har har har.

You can tell how bad the situation is by how bad my puns are.

Barbara was the first to really know the true Doctor, to see the darkness that lay within the old man. And the peculiar kindness. He was the first incarnation to attempt to kill his companions - or at least lethally misplace them, in order to get rid of them.

Barabara was never under any delusions about her traveling companion.

She knew more about him than even he would like to know.

Barbara's eyes locked with mine and begged the question. Not with words, just with a haughty raised eyebrow.

You know I'm almost (cough) (cough) twenty-nine now and a schoolteacher can still make me feel about six years old. Daleks are easier. They're not as very good at making you feel guilty.

I suppose I am guilty. After all, I am playing for the other team (watch it)…

I probably reeked of evil. More of a musk. Guilt by association. I still hadn't done anything wrong really. Nor had the Master. Not for a very long time. But the scent lingers.

I knew though that Barbara was just the face. Inside all that swirling body was what I came for. What I was sent here to release, if even just for a moment.

There was no mention of Mark in the mission brief either. His body was prostrate behind Barbara and his face was still obscured by the glowing light but I could just hear his cry for help.

I didn't really care any more. Mark was in pain, imprisoned. All I wanted to do was release him. Screw the Doctor, screw the Master and their stupid games. I didn't want to be a part of their stratagems anymore. I just wanted Mark back.

* * *

The Doctor's cunning plan had gone horribly wrong.

Obviously.

The thought of sex never entered the Doctor's head.

The thought of sexual orientation, while he was aware of the concept, never featured into his any of his plans.

Mark was killed by his own troops.

The Good Guys.

Not that any such guys ever exist, really. Everyone's an ass sometimes, if you hang around long enough.

The Doctor's plans went down the tubes. Final tally: Aliens 30, Timelord Nil. Whatever timeline the Doctor was hoping to protect, it was well and truly fried now.

I almost died that day. I was stuck in a bus on the road out of Basra. I was getting the hell out of the city as fast as I could, trying to get back to the TARDIS (and I thought, Mark) when the Doctor had been a no-show. Amid the thousands of Iraqi troops withdrawing from the city according to the cease-fire agreement were hundred of civilians who were fleeing with me.

Only four hundred and fifty of us got out alive.

The American planes (my peeps) bombed the front and the back of the convoy first, trapping us in. Then they went to town with every single bomb they could lay their hands on. There were so many planes killing us, they almost had aerial traffic accidents. No one was fighting back. No one could. They were too busy dying on the highway of Death.

Operation Desert Sabre: Shooting fish in a barrel.

I did my research later: apparently, rather than accept a In short, rather than accept the offer of Iraq to surrender and leave the field of battle, Bush decided simply to kill as many Iraqis as possible while the chance lasted, rather than accept a Soviet proposed peace agreement.

I lived through it. I watched the news, read the lies and accepted.

Somewhere in this world is the truth of what really happened. Somewhere in here is the truth about how Mark died.

I was one of the few that survived. Tens of thousands were exterminated. I was lucky that I wasn't on the sixty miles of coastal road that got annihilated. I was one of the fortunate ones.

I'd never seen tens of thousands of corpses before. Or smelled them.

When we got back, we couldn't get an answer out of the military about Mark. They claimed there was never a marine in the regiment with that name (which, admittedly was true).

The Doctor said he found his body and buried him. He took me to the spot, but I didn't believe him any more. Not again.

I spent most of my time talking with the Master in the TARDIS library.

It was the first time that the Doctor's plan failed, but it was not the last by any means.

The Doctor wasn't the man he once was. At least not the guy(s) I've been watching in the TARDIScam footage.

And I didn't really care. I wanted out. And the Master gave me a chance.

* * *

But the Master had gotten it horribly wrong.

I was the wrong Companion.

I didn't care. I couldn't 'free the Truth' with my own will or whatever rubbish thing I needed to do. I didn't like him. I hated him. In that only kind of rational, deep hatred that you're entitled to in a wrongful death when faced with a man who can change time so that he can have warm breakfast sausages. Get there before the toast burns.

And yet he doesn't. He won't.

And Barbara's face, all reason and understanding, the most compassionate and rational companion that the Doctor had ever had was silently asking me, empathizing, waiting for me to sacrifice myself to join with her and surrender my truth, my history to free the Doctor.

I'm the wrong one.

I don't care.

There must be a way out of this place. Have to be smart enough to figure it out. I thought about metaphors and symbolisms and great minds and deep thoughts and all the clever and witty ways and maneuvers that I knew I wasn't capable of in this wondrous and thaumaturgical place. I thought of what the Doctor would do…

Just beyond her, only two feet away was the figure of Mark, still trapped in eternal torment, writhed and twisted in agony.

Screw this shit.

I want my husband back.

I looked long and deep into the eyes of this fantastic creature that held all of the lives of all of the companions that had ever lived and saw all of their experiences before they met the Doctor, all the lives they lived after they left the TARDIS and every breath from the moment of their birth to their last gasping, sighing breaths all contained within this young and intelligent, proper woman and…

And I hit her in the face.

Hard.


	11. Chapter 11

My fist went in up to my elbow, searing with the release of some antic light. I felt something leave me, flowing through my arm and rushing into her/them/it. My body ached with the release of this strange matter that surely the Master had infused my being with before abandoning me. Whether some virus or metaphysical or magical whosi-whatsit, I didn't care. The figure before me was torn asunder in an explosion of light, the scattered remnants darting and tearing at the air around me as I stumbled forward and collapsed before the feet of my love.

The searing energy boiling the space between us I reached out for Mark's hand.

Our skin touched. Reality flared.

It wasn't Mark.

It was the Doctor. The real Doctor. What he had forgotten. What we had all forgotten. The truth of what he was. The truth of what was to become.

I'd been played again. The 'Truth'did not lie within Barbara/the Companions, she was the last defense, the illusion the Doctor made people believe about himself: the barrier the Doctor wore so close to keep the others out. And yet kept his defenders at a distance as well.

* * *

Puff the magic dragon lived by the sea, in a land called Hanalee.

And for the little boy, Puff had a reason to be brave.

But without the Legend, without dragons, real dragons there could be no Puff.

No fossils, no reptiles, no seed of truth, there can be no dragon, no story.

No myth, no origin.

No creation.

Even the Loch Ness Monster shows the odd hump now and again. To keep the tall tales telling. Ensure we keep believing.

* * *

As we touched I felt the last of the strange energy leave me, burning and twisting upwards, barreling upwards through the fluid mantle and gnawing at the crust that would not yield.

I knew then that it wasn't going to be enough.

Too much energy had been spent already.

Not that I'm big with the caring right now.

It couldn't break through. The Truth, the Doctor's reaffirmation, was trapped here with me, deep in the core of an imaginary world the universe wanted to forget.

One of the sprites caught my eye, all frantic red hair and fury. I saw her lick the column of light, tasting the energy, the purpose, the plan.

I could have sworn I saw her shake her head in despair. Then, seeming to shrug, she dove in, spiraling and wrapping around the sagging fountain, re-enforcing, driving it upwards with her energy and split ends, impelling it faster and faster, higher and higher, and the other sprites, the other companions rushed to join her, drilling up and up, riding the conceptual convection currents, railing against the impossible shell that contained this vast nothingness, swirling and finally bursting through to the Universe outside.

I was right in the center of the column. I could see right down the middle of the tunnel of light as it sliced its way through the continuum, a tunnel of purple fire that burned across the star systems and plummeted down through Earth's sky before smacking into a police box was just solidifying out of mid air in Central London.

It plunged straight through the roof and impaled the fading ghost that lay curled round the base of the console. The Doctor. The Doctor with the gray sideburns and the snapping voice. That Doctor. All the Doctors. All the Doctors that have ever been, glowed and twisted and changed, imbued once more with the truth, solidifying the new Doctor out of all the possible Doctors. All the possible alternatives. All the other existences.

Scraping away the histories and the fictions to reveal the person I once knew. The person I thought I knew. The person without the angst, with out the baggage, the man not spread so thinly and re-iterated to the point of meaninglessness. The person I wanted to know. The person who could have saved Mark. The person Barbara wanted him to become.

Our hero.

As the light receded and his new face, still the ninth face, but the _right_ ninth face, faded from my sight, I knew the Universe would be okay. That history would send him a Rose and he would recover and bloom once more.

Which, mind, still left me dying several solar systems away inside a historical gravity well.

Not that I'm bitter.

* * *

As the beam of light dissipated, the crust oozed over, healing itself. My view of Earth, of home, was gone.

As the last of the cracks foamed and hardened, I felt something else slip through those cracks.

Something dark and slimy.

Perhaps the Doctor's not the only new man out there.

So they've both left me.

Cold and alone, lost in the layers of history, long forgotten.

It's a bit like dating in high school.

I can reach for the surface, stroke against the pulling fictional gravity, but what's the point? It's very dramatic and all, but all the energy is gone now. I can't maintain my sanity in here, I'm not meant to be here, I'm a real, physical person, falling, fading, drowning. The Master isn't coming to get me, he doesn't need me. Soon even this chip will cease to broa d cast ass the enerrrggy s

l

i

psaw

ay….

…

m

ar

kist

hatu

ou?


	12. Chapter 12

_**Database extraction.**_

_**Voice recording playback, ship personal log 67544, HHS Verity.**_

INGREDIENTS:

Zinc trisodium, apsartate, sorbitol, bisulphate, oxide, beta-carotene, lactic acid, carob bean, grade-A milk (emulsified), maltodextrin alkalide, silicon deoxylite, sugar, **  
**calcified synthetic salt, artificial barley malt, glycerine, aspartate, folic acid,**  
**monosodium glutamate, dehydrated calciumate, soya bean, oil, butter and fat,  
gelatinised triglycerine, phosphate, soya bean, lecithin, deoxylite, trisilicon, citrus enzymes, B.H.T., powdered milk, baking soda, carob gum, carbohydrates, monosodium glutamate, zinc disodium algeinate, wholegrain flour, yeast, fat, and peanut butter extract…

Those aren't the ingredient in the survival bar. It's just an old candy bar wrapper I found in my pocket. I still can't read the language here.

I never knew that a peanut nutty survival bar could save my life.

A snickers, yes. But that's just good advertising.

I so needed a break.

And I got one.

Or was it 'really satisfies.' Can't remember which slogan… perhaps at the next planet I'll get some satisfaction.

Err… back to the food bar.

As I fell into oblivion, on the surface, a young man swallowed the last of his food bar and the taste of peanut butter and history dissolved in his mouth.

99 percent preservatives and just a little bit of a certain rock crystal I crumbled into it.

A tiny crystal I found on my forehead after I spent dreaming of Mark.

The hand that saved me was strong and firm and I miss Mark so much. I wanted to see him so badly.

The hand didn't belong to Mark.

It was Jonathan, of course.

I'm not an evil master mind. But I am getting better. If you call a mad, insanely impossible plan a plan.

I'm starting to think that it is exactly what the Doctor's been doing all this time.

I got to walk away though. Fly away now that the rescue ship has picked us up. I'm still keeping the logs. Verbal now though. Becoming a habit.

No one on this ship knows about the planet we were on. To them it was just a barren rock that they'll soon forget about. I'm pretty sure Jonathan wants to forget the entire experience.

I'm not sure how he did it. Or which of my memories of Mark were in the crystal. Five years of living together, of fights and making up and Christmas's and taxes and Timelords and tiki marsalas all shoved into one crystal. I did it.

The thought of love, while the Master was aware of the concept, never featured into his any of his plans. I'm sure the Master would have suggested it as plan, but it probably never would occur to him. Timelords don't know much about love.

Wish you were here Mark.

I'm on my way back into the central systems now. Start a new life, I guess. And stay out of the way of history. The only history I have control over is between other people.

And I want to get it right this time.

I've tried to sleep tonight, but the image of being rescued keeps running through my tired mind.

Drowning in the historical abyss I reached for the glowing hand that appeared in front of me. Reached for the hand, reaching for Mark's hand. I felt his fingers slip into mine, felt the strong, urgent tug.

As Jonathan pulled me out of the earth, I saw in his eyes a look of understanding. As he saw me as a person for the first time. He stared at me with look of acceptance, or at least tolerance, as the prejudice and propaganda that cemented into the depths of the world me fell away from my body to shatter upon the ground.

And possibly, just possibly, a tiny bit of compassion.

Which, really, is all you can ask of a person.


End file.
